


open hand or closed fist (the interior decorating remix)

by stiction



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Fisting, Gratuitous interior decorating, Species Swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 19:59:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kanaya’s mouth goes a little dry when Rose carries an armoire across a room by herself, when she clambers up on Rose’s shoulders to paint the molding at the top of each wall, when Rose settles down in their ugly couch each evening to read with her and watch cooking channel programming.</p><p>“Well,” Rose takes to saying, “We can do it. Lowe’s can help.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	open hand or closed fist (the interior decorating remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Duckface](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Rose: Explore](https://archiveofourown.org/works/280743) by [Duckface](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/pseuds/Duckface). 



Rose says no to the first four houses: a cottage in the woods, a sprawling French colonial, a bungalow just outside the city limits, and a bland two-story that looks like it was built in the early Earth 1990’s.

Their real estate agent, a tight-lipped troll with horns that sweep back against her skull, has been faking a smile for so long that Kanaya is starting to feel sympathy for the woman’s cheek muscles. Rose scrapes a long talon along the cheap metal edge of the kitchen sink and purses her lips when her nail leaves a mark.

“Another, then?” The agent makes a scribbled note on her pad of paper. When Rose steps out of the room, the woman sighs something under her breath that sounds like “Seadwellers.”

Kanaya gives her a soft pat on the shoulder.

It’s the fifth house that gets her--tall but not imposing, worn but not abused, roomy but not sprawling. To Kanaya, it looks like something that could eventually approximate a home. A house with room to grow.

Rose has a stillness around her shoulders when Kanaya parks the car at the curb. Her head is ducked down so that she can stare out the window without her horns digging into the roof of the car.

(Kanaya had tried to shop big, really, but there’s only so much height a hybrid car can muster.)

She actually jumps a little when Kanaya touches her arm, the stillness dissolving in an instant.

“I’m going to remain hopeful that your unusual tacitness is a positive reaction,” Kanaya says, offering a smile.

Rose’s smile is small but genuine, her fangs unbared.

“Let’s not count our cluckbeasts,” Rose says. “If this horse’s ass shows us another ugly house I may just build one myself.”

“I can’t imagine it would be too difficult,” Kanaya muses once they’re out of the car. “With my chainsaw, and your raw determination to be contrary, why, we could build pretty much anything.”

Rose inspects each room, corner to corner, and then cracks the lock on the basement door while the real estate agent’s back is turned. She reappears ten minutes later, in the middle of Kanaya’s third fumbling attempt to explain her absence.

There are cobwebs strung across her horns and dangling from the shoulders of her jacket. She offers nothing but a toothy smile.

“So,” the real estate agent says carefully, still shooting sidelong glances at Rose’s dishevelment. “Thoughts?”

Kanaya lifts an eyebrow when they lock eyes. Rose looks into her for a long moment before nodding with a sharp bob of her head.

“We’ll take it,” Kanaya says, and the rush of relief in the real estate agent’s eyes is mirrored in her nervous stomach.

* * *

 

It takes a week for the furniture hunt to truly go sour, for a home-store discussion about end tables to turn into a discreet shouting match--one which Rose promptly ruins by busting out a laugh and collapsing onto the nearest ottoman. Kanaya stands in front of her with her arms crossed.

“Are you finished,” she says, not a question. She nudges Rose’s shin with the pointed toe of her flat. “Some of us would like to put furniture in their home, instead of placing all of their belongings on artfully balanced cardboard boxes.”

Rose lifts her head, eyes bleary with tears of mirth, and reaches to hold Kanaya’s hands in her own.

“Kanaya,” she chokes. “Darling. I don’t give a flying fuck about our home’s aesthetic.”

“Then I’d greatly prefer it if you’d just let me _choose_.”

“Absolutely,” Rose says. “I lay my life and my half of our collective interior decorating decision-making power in your capable hands.”

She punctuates the statement with a firm kiss laid on Kanaya’s knuckles. Kanaya hates herself a little for how quickly the anger fades, but… The lipstick mark on her fingers lingers for hours, and sometimes she catches Rose giggling and attempting to muffle it, and at the end of the day she gets to drive them home knowing that the delivery truck will be there at ten o’clock the next morning.

Maybe she’ll even miss the cardboard box furniture.

* * *

 

It takes almost six hours to get all of the furniture they’d bought inside and properly adjusted. They don’t have everything, not by a long shot, but having their mid-day break on actual chairs is a pleasant change. Kanaya preps an appetizer tray and Rose feeds her grapes and crackers with cheese.

“I want to paint the living room a different color,” Kanaya mumbles around a mouthful of Ritz and cheap pepperjack cheese.  Rose inclines her head, drags a finger through the puddle of off-putting liquid her own meal has left on the plate, sticks her finger in her mouth.

“What color?”

“Something that would accent that fetching couch I saw in the antique shop.”

“The ugly one?” Rose asks, stealing Kanaya’s glass of water.

“That one precisely,” Kanaya confirms. The expression on Rose’s face doesn’t change, remains unconcerned except for a smile playing around the rim of the glass.

“Well,” Rose says, “We can do it. Lowe’s can help.”

* * *

 

It feels good to have a house that is hers again.

Kanaya arranges and rearranges and spreads paint samples across their dining room table to compare. The walls will complement the trimming will complement the furniture and the dishes and the accent decorations she picks out from antique shops and cluttered Alternian-style open-air markets.

She helps Rose rinse the dust off her fins and promises to wipe everything down twice a week. In between a half dozen trips to hardware stores, a handful of custom-mixed cans of paint, and the  installation of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in Rose’s study (complete with sliding ladder), the home starts to feel like theirs.

Kanaya’s mouth goes a little dry when Rose carries an armoire across a room by herself, when she clambers up on Rose’s shoulders to paint the molding at the top of each wall, when Rose settles down in their ugly couch each evening to read with her and watch cooking channel programming. Rose slings her legs across Kanaya’s lap and stretches, points her webbed toes to the opposite wall until her joints pop.

And then Kanaya tells her it’s bad for her to do that, and Rose does it again, and Kanaya sighs and rolls her eyes and strokes her palms across Rose’s shins and calves.

Sometimes, just to keep things “spicy”, Rose will spark a bickering match about watching a baking show versus a cooking show--one dark evening she insisted they watch Barefoot Contessa and Kanaya had to go for a long drive through the city to calm down--or needle Kanaya about how the chairs in the kitchen seem to be a shade off from the table.

Kanaya knows this because, for one, she’s not an idiot, and for another, she hears Rose talking to Dave about it on a video call a month into renovations. She stops outside of the study door when she hears her name.

“I just feel that--” Rose starts, and pauses. “How better to continue a relationship than in the fashion that you started it?”

“Sounds fucked,” Dave replies.

“Maybe a little bit, yeah,” Rose sighs. “We bought a hive together, Dave. We have a wine rack.”

“And you’re drowning in sudden existential fear of being bland.”

It’s quiet for a moment.

“Yeah,” Dave continues. “I thought so.”

Kanaya goes back to the kitchen. Yesterday she finally got around to picking up a knife set, a cutting board, and enough cutlery to get them by until she finds a full set she liked. The knives are brightly colored and sharp enough to surprise her with the first cut she makes.

She’s making--something. It’s hard to focus on chopping vegetables. The water she puts on to boil bubbles over and the stove flares up. Her knife slips and nicks her finger and she bleeds all over the carrots and--

She wraps the cut in a paper towel and turns off the burner and calmly, calmly, calmly walks to the bathroom to get a band-aid out of the cupboard. There is blood on the old porcelain sink when Kanaya finishes.

* * *

 

“You’re not here,” Rose says, swiping her fingers across her chin.

She shakes loose of Kanaya’s fingers in her hair. It sticks up around her horns, falls coarse across her forehead and tickles the insides of Kanaya’s thighs.

Kanaya’s breath is rough and her hands on Rose’s horns go slack.

“Not where?”

“Here,” Rose repeats. Her hand squeezes Kanaya’s knee, hard enough to make her leg jump. “What’s rattling around that pan of yours?”

Kanaya shifts her weight to one side. The edge between the two cushions on their loveseat digs into the small of her back and she’s sure it’s going to leave a mark. She uncorked a bottle of wine two hours ago that’s half gone now and Kanaya can’t take her eyes off Rose’s light grey fingers against her dark skin.

She swallows and clears her throat and means to say _nothing_ , but it comes out as: “Are you bored?”

Rose stares. Her bangs are mussed and Kanaya reaches, reflexive, to straighten them.

“Do you think--” Kanaya’s arms are tingling, weak from the wine and the afteraffects of clenching her hands in Rose’s hair for nearly ten minutes. “Are we going to become something… commonplace? Suburban and grossly average and… bland?”

The effect is immediate--Rose flinches at the word bland, her secondary eyelids blinking without a twitch from the primary ones. She shrugs Kanaya’s legs off of her shoulders and strides out of the room without a comment.

Kanaya’s hands fall to the loveseat’s cushions. The fabric is soft and velvety, a little garish for her taste but comfortable in all the right places. Maybe she really bought it to piss Rose off. Her fingers dig in as she bites her lips, draws them into a thin line and stifles the wave of drunken emotion that threatens to well up past the bridge of her nose and out her eyes.

She can hear, faintly, a clattering in the bathroom, the soft thunk of the bathroom cabinet shutting.

Rose must only be gone for a few minutes, since Kanaya only wallows in self-loathing for a short while before she hears footsteps coming back down the hall; before she rubs at her slightly damp eyes and sits up a little. For posterity, if for nothing else. She tucks her legs back up onto the couch, but can’t quite muster the energy to scramble to get dressed again before Rose steps back around the arm of the loveseat and sits next to her.

Rose touches her ankle, strokes up towards her knee.

“Is that what you think?” she asks, more gently than Rose tends to ask anything.

Kanaya doesn’t know very much about quadrants, but the tone is gentle--the way Rose speaks to Dave about anything more delicate than work or current events. She keeps her eyes trained on her immaculate nails. She painted them today, a dark green to complement her eyes and the warm tones in her skin.

“Kanaya,” Rose presses. Her fingers close around Kanaya’s ankle, too tight to be pale, too light to be black. A Rose Lalond level of pressure. Her other hand moves up, grazes Kanaya’s stomach and the bottom ridge of her ribs and up past her unbuttoned shirt to lift her chin.

Something is different, aside from the look in Rose’s eyes. The pad of Rose’s thumb presses against her lower lip, drags gently downwards, and that’s when the difference clicks: No claws.

Rose blunted them.

Rose’s fingers are soft, defenseless where she is normally razor sharp, where her thumb slips up and in. Kanaya’s tongue traces the clipped edge of the nail.

She doesn’t know very much about quadrants, no--but she’s seen how the trolls act when they’ve been declawed. John overcompensates by upping the slapstick gig; Jade makes sure everyone knows just how long her teeth are; and Dave. Dave, she knows, clips his claws more often than the others, is more used to it, but Kanaya is built to worry and since it’s Rose’s job to keep him whole she knows how his shoulders round down. She’s seen how he makes himself a smaller target.

There’s an imbalance between the four of them.

The imbalance is Rose.

Rose cuts her claws and strides through crowds with her shoulders back and neck long.

Rose cuts her claws and replaces the thumb in Kanaya’s mouth with two fingers.

Rose cuts her claws and presses her fingers down against Kanaya’s tongue, stares her dead in the eyes like if Kanaya’s skin was also grey it would be a show of dominance. It’s definitely a huge middle finger to the status quo, to social dynamics, to her purple blood and to radical Earth purists.

“Now,” Rose murmurs, “Kanaya.”

Her fingers are a slow pressure, a long thrust so the second knuckles are just edging past Kanaya’s teeth before drawing back.

“I want you to ask yourself something.”

Rose’s other hand slips between Kanaya’s thighs and edges them apart. Normally she doesn’t--normally they don’t--normally her fingers are a dangerous intrusion. Normally substituted for mouth or tongue or bulge. Even now the blunt edges of her nails are still enough to be felt. Her fingers, two fingers, slip up and inside.

“Do I look bored?” Rose asks.

The answer is, obviously, no. Rose looks hungry. Intense. Kanaya shivers hard, her mouth falling open around Rose’s fingers.

Rose lets her fingers drop to Kanaya’s neck, trailing wet down to her collarbone and resting there against her hot skin.

“No,” Kanaya murmurs finally.

“Good.”

She leans in, her lips gone chilled again after so long away from Kanaya’s body. Kanaya’s skin goes tight with the heat sinking away against Rose’s mouth, Rose’s hands and chest, all the way down to Rose’s two fingers thrusting inside her.

“Kanaya,” Rose says again a moment later, her mouth moving down across the line of Kanaya’s jaw. “We should try something new.”

“New?" Kanaya repeats. "I feel compelled to ask for some clarification, or at least, maybe, whether new implies dramatic or excessive or--”

“Neither,” Rose says, then concedes: “Maybe excessive.” And: “A little excessive.”

She moves her other hand, lays it on Kanaya’s thigh. Her two first fingers are warmer than the rest of her and a little damp. Kanaya wants to die of tenderness, just looking at the slight shine of Rose’s fingers and the way her hand lays. Then she wants to die of embarrassment, despite having kept the thought to herself.

 _No more wine_ , she thinks. And yet.

“Hold on,” Kanaya says, touching a hand to Rose’s mouth. She scoots back and slips off the couch. The kitchen floor is sticky under her feet where the hardwood meets the humid air of summer. Out the window she can still see the sun dipping below the treetops, and all that molten light has painted her countertops orange.

She picks the bottle of wine up from the countertop and shakes it gently to measure what’s left before the bottle goes to her lips, tips back. The drink is long and sweet, pink moscato on pink tongue and then hitting her stomach with a pleasant tingle.

Kanaya drinks again, then finds her glass next to the sink and refills it.

The sunlight slanting through the window heats her skin; the scar on her stomach shines when she moves.  

“More wine?” Rose watches her come through the doorway over the back of the couch.

“I thought it appropriate.”

When she sits back down, the show on the television jumps back into action. The remote is wedged between her back and the couch cushion and with a slosh of moscato Kanaya is pressed against the couch cushion, pinned by Rose’s firm hand on her breastbone.

The eye contact stretches as long as the shadows of their living room furniture in the sunset.

“If you mean excessive the same way you normally mean ominous and largely unspecific adjectives, then--” Kanaya doesn’t break the gaze, holds it firm despite the quake in her composure as she brings wineglass to lips and sips.

“There are a lot of unspecific adjectives,” Rose says. Her thumb twitches slightly in the dip between Kanaya’s breasts. “This use isn’t quite so dramatic.”

Another sip, a measured hesitation: “Oh?”  

“No,” Rose says. “Consider it an exercise in cross-cultural values.”

Kanaya holds her tongue, holds her wine, holds her head in one place even when Rose’s fingers fall back between her legs. Two again, in a measuredly gentle slide.

“I may or may not have had a delightful conversation with our good friend Karkat last week,” Rose continues.

“I can hardly hazard a guess as to the subject of that conversation,” Kanaya muses, dry as she can manage while hot and wet around Rose’s fingers.

“I plead the Fifth--” Kanaya hides a smile since she knows, as she knows with many new additions to Rose’s vernacular, exactly when Rose learned it. “--but it was, regardless of details, illuminating. Trolls don’t value extremes the way all of you here do.”

Kanaya’s thighs twitch together when Rose pulls her fingers out, when she reaches behind herself for the small plastic bottle of name-brand lubricant Kanaya had shame-facedly purchased while shopping at the start of the month. They’ve barely dipped into it--Rose is nothing if not consistently slick, and they’ve been so busy with the home--but Rose clicks the cap open and pours some into her cupped hand like it’s second nature to her.

“You would think it would be the other way around,” Rose continues, her tone conversational. “With quadrants, with our… Dynamics. But humans, well. You’ve perfected the art of pushing boundaries.”

The triangle of three fingertips makes Kanaya jump at first. Room-temperature lube, room-temperature girlfriend. She relaxes, steadies her hand so she can take another sip, breathes in sharp through her nose when Rose sinks knuckle-deep. A soft noise slips out when Rose makes a less gentle thrust and slips deeper, her thumb and fourth finger laced together and braced against Kanaya’s pubic bone.

“He also cleared up a linguistic dispute for me.”

Kanaya drains her glass with a shaking hand, nearly drops it when Rose curls her fingers slightly.

“You know, my dear--it’s a little cruel to let someone languish in mistranslation. I had to rely on the kindness of Karkat of all people, just to be made aware that _fisting_ someone was not at all the same act as _fist-bumping_ them.”

She pauses, looks up towards Kanaya with a well-worn look of fool-me-once.

“I suppose now is the time to act chagrined and apologize for misleading you,” Kanaya says. Her hips shift, angle up so that Rose’s fingers move a little, a minute relief.

There’s a shade of a smile around Rose’s mouth and her fingers thrust once, deep and strong. Her hands are so big, three fingers enough of a stretch to feel good, palms that can span the backs of Kanaya’s thighs and hoist them up.

“I would never ask that of you,” Rose says. The hand on Kanaya’s chest finally lifts, ghosts a sweet touch across Kanaya’s mouth. “However--”

Kanaya speaks before thinking, the hot eager feeling in her gut from too much wine and the thought of Rose’s hands on her jumping before simple personal safety.

“I think you should do it,” she says, cuts Rose’s sentence cleanly in two and actually manages to shock her silent for a moment. Rose covers with a careful and curated neutral face. She reaches to take the wineglass with her free hand and set it on the coffee table.

“Okay,” Rose agrees simply. No question of surety, even in the overwhelming mire of uncertainty that is their continued existence.

Her fingers leave a cold absence in the quick moment it takes her to apply more lube, to stop and rake her eyes across Kanaya’s body until the attention makes her shiver. Then she bows her head to Kanaya’s knee and puts three fingers back in.

It’s a slow and coaxing process. Rose rotates her hand, presses deep before retreating, before Kanaya can loosen up enough for the inconceivable stretch of four of Rose’s fingers. It almost hurts, almost, but retreats from pain into the tightening hum that comprises pre-orgasmic haze.

Kanaya’s breath is quick and her shoulders are rolled back over the arm of the couch so that her face is tilted towards the ceiling. The sun is finally setting when Rose edges the tip of her thumb in above her stacked fingers and the air stills in Kanaya’s lungs.

“Darling,” Rose says then. Barely audible over the noise Kanaya makes when her thumb slips in to the first joint. “It doesn’t matter what’s going to happen. We own this beautiful wreck of a hive, and the lawnring around it. It doesn’t matter if we burn the place down next week, or if whatever horribly pretentious spawn we produce inherits it when we eventually sink into the ether.”

There’s a moment of blinding strain--Rose presses her mouth against Kanaya’s knee, points of her teeth scraping against the sensitive skin--when Rose pushes, and Kanaya gives, and suddenly Rose’s fingers are folding over and Kanaya bites a sob into her wrist.

“This is it,” Rose murmurs, bending to kiss Kanaya’s stomach. “This is our reward. For dying a hundred times over, for killing our friends and enemies. We get to sink into domestic bliss and argue about using coasters on the antique wood and...” She shifts, kisses up until her mouth is at Kanaya’s ear. There’s a tremble running from her mouth, down her spine and to her hands and feet that Kanaya can _feel_. “With you, nothing will ever be bland.”

Kanaya cranes her neck to press their mouths together, and Rose exhales a hard breath and just-- _twists_ her wrist, and suddenly it’s too much. Kanaya’s heels dig into the couch cushion, her hips rising until Rose’s body pins them back down. Her incoherencies are inaudible, swallowed in Rose’s mouth and the loud sound of tearing fabric.

It feels like a dizzy eternity before Rose can ease her hand out.

Surreal, now that only moonlight is coming through the windows, and troll Alton Brown is hosting yet another episode of Cullthroat Kitchen, and Rose has her cool face resting against Kanaya’s sweaty stomach. Her breath ghosts across scar tissue and navel each time her chest rises and falls.

“I can’t believe you massacred our couch,” Kanaya says finally.

She raises one hand to trace the gaping flap of upholstery on the back of the couch where one of Rose’s horns snagged it.

“Did you hate it that much?” she asks, dropping her hand to Rose’s head and scratching between her horns.

“If it were a troll,” Rose mumbles, “I would’ve already cemented it in my caliginous quadrant.”

Kanaya huffs out a laugh, too tired for much else, and Rose rubs her face against Kanaya’s ribs in a contented stretch.

* * *

 

“I’ll call in a favor with John,” Rose offers the next morning, over their morning meal. "To fix the thing you're calling a couch, that is."

Kanaya, with a slight ache between her legs, smiles into her cup of tea.

 


End file.
